How to Survive the Holiday Season

By the time you read this, it will be too late...

For many, the holiday season can be a time of great rejoicing (this profound mass psychological imbalance was caused some years ago by a rogue voodoo priest who cursed the winter solstice). For the rest of us, however, the holidays descend like a Chinese Dragon, breathing fire and destroying everything we love. The following survival guide should be laminated and kept in your wallet.

The Company Christmas Holiday Party - It's a Trap!

For the uninitiated, the Company Holiday Party seems like a great opportunity to rub elbows with higher-ups and get some good team player or company man points. This line of thinking is flawed, and it's exactly what they want you to believe. If they really wanted to rub elbows with you, why do they have clipboards, and why are they making notes on your conversations? Why then, as the night goes on, are they watching angrily from behind a bottle of Old Grand Dad whiskey?

Be warned - this is when they decide how to thin out the herd. The libations are just fool's juice, and this is the Great Test. Fun Fact: 90% of Corporate Management carries a concealed Taser during holiday parties to keep the rowdy worker bees at bay, and for quick egress from boring conversations. Most work related tasings occur between December 20th and January 1st.

Shopping - The Deadliest Game

Being out on the road, traveling from store to store hunting for bargains - this is when you are most at risk... you are not the only hunter. There is an unknown active ingredient in most commercial egg nog and egg nog flavored products that causes severe psychotic lapses in approximately 70% of the population. Some symptoms include irritability, sudden rage, disorientation, loss of hearing, and an insatiable lust for human blood.

Add to this the profound sensory overload of the commercial jungle of the average shopping mall or Walmart, and you've got an army of blood-crazy, red bulled, shop-til-you-drop, free-range soccer moms charging headlong into battle with the heads of the fallen on poles, smeared with entrails. Fun Fact: Most holiday related deaths aren't the result of frantic parents curb-stomping each other to get the last Cabbage Patch doll or Fondle Me Elmo... for the past ten years, the leading cause of holiday related death has been disgruntled children garroting their sleeping parents for not getting them the season's hottest toy.

Consider yourselves warned. My advice? Hunker down and drink heavily, and just maybe, by some stroke of luck or even an act of god, you might just make it to 2011 alive.

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Twelve Days of Excess

Ten lords a-leaping, nine ladies dancing, eight maids a-milking...

The Twelve Days of Christmas are a direct extension of the Bigger is Better ethos that governs Christian thought. Uh-oh. The Christians, not to be out-done, see the eight days of Hanukkah as a threat to their monopoly of the season - and address it accordingly. Oh boy. Thus the Twelve Days of Christmas - because twelve is clearly more than eight. Here we go. 

Hanukkah I understand. Long ago, some Maccabees had only enough lamp oil to last one night - but it lasted eight nights, therefore cause for celebration. I posit that during these eight nights, humor was invented. Upon seeing this miracle, the head Maccabee, Judah, exclaimed "I love lamp!" A dramatization of this moment was later adapted for the movie Anchorman, the Legend of Ron Burgundy.

On the other hand, the Twelve Days of Christmas is just a party. It starts on Jesus' birthday (but not really), and lasts thirteen days (math?), ending on the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th. The modern American version of this is known as the Nine Days of Walmart. It starts on December 24th, and lasts until January 1st. The holiday is celebrated by drinking copious amounts of booze, eggnog and Coca-Cola, while eating too much ham, cookies and candies, and singing about fictional people (Santa), fiction food (sugar plums) and fictional events (Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer).

Modern Shamanism

“A warrior acts as if he knows what he is doing, when in effect he knows nothing...” - Carlos Castaneda

Shaman, not to be confused with She-man (that is a whole other topic), is a word not commonly used nowadays. Mysticality has gone by the wayside due, directly, to a lack of commercial presence. But it's more prevalent you might think - how else could you explain the rise of the celebutante. We don't openly discuss Walmart's voodoo practice of raising the dead and training them to be greeters, and only hint at, in hushed tones, Chili's late night ritual of slaughtering stray dogs and lightly dusting the wait staff's aprons with cocaine. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

I was once given some sage advice from a well practiced and battle-worn shaman in Hartford who was working at a 7-11. I was hungry and requested the last Big Bite hot dog. He said "You don't want THAT one. That one's for the after-party boys." By the way his mischievous eyes beamed, I knew that he had crafted it for the late-night, last-call crowd. But behind the smile there was hidden wince of pain - on some lonely night long ago he had been rolled by a few popped collar types, and had since been serving his revenge. On further inspection of the Big Bite, it was nothing more than a dried and wrinkled gorilla dong - clearly an ingredient of witchcraft. I would hate to see what the bun looked like.